In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came
up with the very strange idea of selling information processing
machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders
made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being
daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul
Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling
computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of
Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical
reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in
and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible
incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk
was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The
product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when
properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate
other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who
actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to
think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a
breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever
be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating
systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating
systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with
celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The
market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has
been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded
people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating
systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their
relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically
unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software
that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows
machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable
and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke
up now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand
everything in it--almost:
Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what?
Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the
Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly
with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of
Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine
recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating
exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such
an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started
going all PC-versus-Mac on me."
What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system
business have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is
entirely subjective; but since I have spent a fair amount of time not
only using, but programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux
boxes and the BeOS, perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be
completely worthless. This is a subjective essay, more review than
research paper, and so it might seem unfair or biased compared to the
technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever since the
Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and
anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned.
MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up
these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of
my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage.
Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would
take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild
youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a
madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust
of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin
Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.
In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's
relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long
way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have
a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a
Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a
member of an oppressed minority group.
The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very
important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that
counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive.
It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones,
every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's
hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it.
The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us
passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as
interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches
numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience.
For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a
larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.
The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so
let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive
summary of our situation today.
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are
situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the
others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles
(MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke
you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one
day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively
styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they
worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the
original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg
contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it
to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear
goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple
owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the
windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared
with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a
colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal
of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and
it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a
hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT)
which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little
more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has
changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled
sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They
have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for
so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps
making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along
more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the
BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans,
better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as
reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the
others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and
which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees,
and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The
people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned,
cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S.
Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated
technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army
tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever
break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary
streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are
being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number
of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the
ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it
away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety
percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station
wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other
dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan,
pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy
the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the
opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior
vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut
who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to
accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is
staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with
bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible
situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks!
It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety
miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is
true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes
wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here,
and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours,
listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send
volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
BIT-FLINGER
The connection between cars, and ways of interacting with computers,
wouldn't have occurred to me at the time I was being taken for rides
in that MGB. I had signed up to take a computer programming class at
Ames High School. After a few introductory lectures, we students were
granted admission into a tiny room containing a teletype, a telephone,
and an old-fashioned modem consisting of a metal box with a pair of
rubber cups on the top (note: many readers, making their way through
that last sentence, probably felt an initial pang of dread that this
essay was about to turn into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about
how tough we had it back in the old days; rest assured that I am
actually positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as it were, in
preparation to make a point about truly hip and up-to-the minute
topics like Open Source Software). The teletype was exactly the same
sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive
telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce
UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine
with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper
underneath.
In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to
the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the
phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then
slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one
would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around
the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf.
The teletype would shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the
distant mainframe, and begin to hammer out cryptic messages.
Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch
processing technique. Before dialing the phone, we would turn on the
tape puncher (a subsidiary machine bolted to the side of the teletype)
and type in our programs. Each time we depressed a key, the teletype
would bash out a letter on the paper in front of us, so we could read
what we'd typed; but at the same time it would convert the letter into
a set of eight binary digits, or bits, and punch a corresponding
pattern of holes across the width of a paper tape. The tiny disks of
paper knocked out of the tape would flutter down into the clear
plastic hopper, which would slowly fill up what can only be described
as actual bits. On the last day of the school year, the smartest kid
in the class (not me) jumped out from behind his desk and flung
several quarts of these bits over the head of our teacher, like
confetti, as a sort of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image of
this man sitting there, gripped in the opening stages of an atavistic
fight-or-flight reaction, with millions of bits (megabytes) sifting
down out of his hair and into his nostrils and mouth, his face
gradually turning purple as he built up to an explosion, is the single
most memorable scene from my formal education.
Anyway, it will have been obvious that my interaction with the
computer was of an extremely formal nature, being sharply divided up
into different phases, viz.: (1) sitting at home with paper and
pencil, miles and miles from any computer, I would think very, very
hard about what I wanted the computer to do, and translate my
intentions into a computer language--a series of alphanumeric symbols
on a page. (2) I would carry this across a sort of informational
cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to school and type those
letters into a machine--not a computer--which would convert the
symbols into binary numbers and record them visibly on a tape. (3)
Then, through the rubber-cup modem, I would cause those numbers to be
sent to the university mainframe, which would (4) do arithmetic on
them and send different numbers back to the teletype. (5) The
teletype would convert these numbers back into letters and hammer them
out on a page and (6) I, watching, would construe the letters as
meaningful symbols.
The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is admirably
clean: computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans
construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now
being blurred, or at least complicated, by the advent of modern
operating systems that use, and frequently abuse, the power of
metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger audience. Along the
way--possibly because of those metaphors, which make an operating
system a sort of work of art--people start to get emotional, and grow
attached to pieces of software in the way that my friend's dad did to
his MGB.
People who have only interacted with computers through graphical user
interfaces like the MacOS or Windows--which is to say, almost everyone
who has ever used a computer--may have been startled, or at least
bemused, to hear about the telegraph machine that I used to
communicate with a computer in 1973. But there was, and is, a good
reason for using this particular kind of technology. Human beings
have various ways of communicating to each other, such as music, art,
dance, and facial expressions, but some of these are more amenable
than others to being expressed as strings of symbols. Written
language is the easiest of all, because, of course, it consists of
strings of symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong to
a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms), converting them
into bits is a trivial procedure, and one that was nailed,
technologically, in the early nineteenth century, with the
introduction of Morse code and other forms of telegraphy.
We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had
computers. When computers came into being around the time of the
Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by
simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for
translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card
machines.
These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing.
When you were using cards, you'd punch a whole stack of them and run
them through the reader all at once, which was called batch
processing. You could also do batch processing with a teletype, as I
have already described, by using the paper tape reader, and we were
certainly encouraged to use this approach when I was in high school.
But--though efforts were made to keep us unaware of this--the teletype
could do something that the card reader could not. On the teletype,
once the modem link was established, you could just type in a line and
hit the return key. The teletype would send that line to the
computer, which might or might not respond with some lines of its own,
which the teletype would hammer out--producing, over time, a
transcript of your exchange with the machine. This way of doing it
did not even have a name at the time, but when, much later, an
alternative became available, it was retroactively dubbed the Command
Line Interface.
When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large, stifling
rooms where scores of students would sit in front of slightly updated
versions of the same machines and write computer programs: these used
dot-matrix printing mechanisms, but were (from the computer's point of
view) identical to the old teletypes. By that point, computers were
better at time-sharing--that is, mainframes were still mainframes, but
they were better at communicating with a large number of terminals at
once. Consequently, it was no longer necessary to use batch
processing. Card readers were shoved out into hallways and boiler
rooms, and batch processing became a nerds-only kind of thing, and
consequently took on a certain eldritch flavor among those of us who
even knew it existed. We were all off the Batch, and on the Command
Line, interface now--my very first shift in operating system
paradigms, if only I'd known it.
A huge stack of accordion-fold paper sat on the floor underneath each
one of these glorified teletypes, and miles of paper shuddered through
their platens. Almost all of this paper was thrown away or recycled
without ever having been touched by ink--an ecological atrocity so
glaring that those machines soon replaced by video
terminals--so-called "glass teletypes"--which were quieter and didn't
waste paper. Again, though, from the computer's point of view these
were indistinguishable from World War II-era teletype machines. In
effect we still used Victorian technology to communicate with
computers until about 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced with its
Graphical User Interface. Even after that, the Command Line continued
to exist as an underlying stratum--a sort of brainstem reflex--of many
modern computer systems all through the heyday of Graphical User
Interfaces, or GUIs as I will call them from now on.
GUIs
Now the first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece
of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being
worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid
of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings
of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams.
They are to telegrams what modern humans are to Cro-Magnon man, which
is to say the same thing under a different name. All that you see on
your computer screen--your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail
messages, faxes, and word processing documents written in thirty-seven
different typefaces--is still, from the computer's point of view, just
like telegrams, except much longer, and demanding of more arithmetic.
The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web
browser, visit a site, and then select the View/Document Source menu
item. You will get a bunch of computer code that looks something like
this:

C R Y P T O N O M I C O N

This crud is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and it is
basically a very simple programming language instructing your web
browser how to draw a page on a screen. Anyone can learn HTML and
many people do. The important thing is that no matter what splendid
multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just
telegrams.
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball
games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the
telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit
there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the
paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his
hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three
and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's
eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the
sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from
home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape
announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a
pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the
ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom
presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching
the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his
descriptions.
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the
pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald
Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.
So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between
you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer
used to convert the information you're working with--be it images,
e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents--into the
necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work
with. When we used actual telegraph equipment (teletypes) or their
higher-tech substitutes ("glass teletypes," or the MS-DOS command
line) to work with our computers, we were very close to the bottom of
that stack. When we use most modern operating systems, though, our
interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is
interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down
through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses of
that word. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces were
not for everyone, and that it would be a good thing to make computers
more accessible to a less technical audience--if not for altruistic
reasons, then because those sorts of people constituted an
incomparably vaster market. It was clear the the Mac's engineers saw
a whole new country stretching out before them; you could almost hear
them muttering, "Wow! We don't have to be bound by files as linear
streams of bytes anymore, vive la revolution, let's see how far we can
take this!" No command line interface was available on the Macintosh;
you talked to it with the mouse, or not at all. This was a statement
of sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity. It seemed that the
designers of the Mac intended to sweep Command Line Interfaces into
the dustbin of history.
My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring of
1984 in a computer store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when a friend of
mine--coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh
running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July
of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh
Powerbook and instead instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so
thoroughly that two different disk crash utility programs were unable
to find any trace that it had ever existed. During the intervening
ten years, I had a passion for the MacOS that seemed righteous and
reasonable at the time but in retrospect strikes me as being exactly
the same sort of goofy infatuation that my friend's dad had with his
car.
The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the
computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made
computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses,
leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an
insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area
hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility
and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish
video game?
This debate actually seems more interesting to me today than it did in
the mid-1980s. But people more or less stopped debating it when
Microsoft endorsed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first
Windows. At this point, command-line partisans were relegated to the
status of silly old grouches, and a new conflict was touched off,
between users of MacOS and users of Windows.
There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked
different from other PCs even when they were turned off: they
consisted of one box containing both CPU (the part of the computer
that does arithmetic on bits) and monitor screen. This was billed, at
the time, as a philosophical statement of sorts: Apple wanted to make
the personal computer into an appliance, like a toaster. But it also
reflected the purely technical demands of running a graphical user
interface. In a GUI machine, the chips that draw things on the screen
have to be integrated with the computer's central processing unit, or
CPU, to a far greater extent than is the case with command-line
interfaces, which until recently didn't even know that they weren't
just talking to teletypes.
This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it became
clearer when the machine crashed (it is commonly the case with
technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by
watching them fail). When everything went to hell and the CPU began
spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and
lines of perfectly formed but random characters on the screen--known
to cognoscenti as "going Cyrillic." But to the MacOS, the screen was
not a teletype, but a place to put graphics; the image on the screen
was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the contents of a particular
portion of the computer's memory. When the computer crashed and wrote
gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked
vaguely like static on a broken television set--a "snow crash."
And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying differences
endured; when a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line
interface would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain
sealing off the proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got
into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was
funny the first time you saw it.
And these were by no means superficial differences. The reversion of
Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that
Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan
flung over a rotted-out sofa. They were disturbed and annoyed by the
sense that lurking underneath Windows' ostensibly user-friendly
interface was--literally--a subtext.
For their part, Windows fans might have made the sour observation that
all computers, even Macintoshes, were built on that same subtext, and
that the refusal of Mac owners to admit that fact to themselves seemed
to signal a willingness, almost an eagerness, to be duped.
Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips
on the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in arbitrarily
complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy, but in the
technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s, the only
realistic way to do it was to build the motherboard (which contained
the CPU) and the video system (which contained the memory that was
mapped onto the screen) as a tightly integrated whole--hence the
single, hermetically sealed case that made the Macintosh so
distinctive.
When Windows came out, it was conspicuous for its ugliness, and its
current successors, Windows 95 and Windows NT, are not things that
people would pay money to look at either. Microsoft's complete
disregard for aesthetics gave all of us Mac-lovers plenty of
opportunities to look down our noses at them. That Windows looked an
awful lot like a direct ripoff of MacOS gave us a burning sense of
moral outrage to go with it. Among people who really knew and
appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's non-pejorative sense
of that word) and in a few other niches such as professional
musicians, graphic artists and schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a
while, was simply the computer. It was seen as not only a superb
piece of engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the
use of technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a
pathetically clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot
rolled into one. So very early, a pattern had been established that
endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they
dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the end,
self-defeating.
CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP
Now that the Third Rail has been firmly grasped, it is worth reviewing
some basic facts here: like any other publicly traded, for-profit
corporation, Microsoft has, in effect, borrowed a bunch of money from
some people (its stockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As
an officer of that corporation, Bill Gates has one responsibility
only, which is to maximize return on investment. He has done this
incredibly well. Any actions taken in the world by Microsoft-any
software released by them, for example--are basically epiphenomena,
which can't be interpreted or understood except insofar as they
reflect Bill Gates's execution of his one and only responsibility.
It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically
unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they
are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because
Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make
more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious,
known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free.
This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching
Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and
it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too
powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all
strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when
the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they
had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their
tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very
embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity--it is, in a word,
bourgeois--and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word 6.0 summed it up pretty
neatly: when you started up the program you were treated to a picture
of an expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of sheets of
fancy-looking handmade writing paper. It was obviously a bid to make
the software look classy, and it might have worked for some, but it
failed for me, because the pen was a ballpoint, and I'm a fountain pen
man. If Apple had done it, they would've used a Mont Blanc fountain
pen, or maybe a Chinese calligraphy brush. And I doubt that this was
an accident. Recently I spent a while re-installing Windows NT on one
of my home computers, and many times had to double-click on the
"Control Panel" icon. For reasons that are difficult to fathom, this
icon consists of a picture of a clawhammer and a chisel or screwdriver
resting on top of a file folder.
These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to make
fun of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if Microsoft
had done focus group testing of possible alternative graphics, they
probably would have found that the average mid-level office worker
associated fountain pens with effete upper management toffs and was
more comfortable with ballpoints. Likewise, the regular guys, the
balding dads of the world who probably bear the brunt of setting up
and maintaining home computers, can probably relate better to a
picture of a clawhammer--while perhaps harboring fantasies of taking a
real one to their balky computers.
This is the only way I can explain certain peculiar facts about the
current market for operating systems, such as that ninety percent of
all customers continue to buy station wagons off the Microsoft lot
while free tanks are there for the taking, right across the street.
A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates
to distribute, one he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was
selling it--reassuring customers that they were actually getting
something in return for their money.
Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the
curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box
home, tearing it open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away
all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the
disk into the computer. The end result (after you've lost the disk)
is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some
capabilities that weren't there before. Sometimes you don't even have
that--you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is
definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty
years ago it was a very dicey business proposition. Bill Gates made
it work anyway. He didn't make it work by selling the best software
or offering the cheapest price. Instead he somehow got people to
believe that they were receiving something in exchange for their
money.
The streets of every city in the world are filled with those hulking,
rattling station wagons. Anyone who doesn't own one feels a little
weird, and wonders, in spite of himself, whether it might not be time
to cease resistance and buy one; anyone who does, feels confident that
he has acquired some meaningful possession, even on those days when
the vehicle is up on a lift in an auto repair shop.
All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie,
which is as much a mental, as a material state. And it explains why
Microsoft is regularly attacked, on the Net, from both sides. People
who are inclined to feel poor and oppressed construe everything
Microsoft does as some sinister Orwellian plot. People who like to
think of themselves as intelligent and informed technology users are
driven crazy by the clunkiness of Windows.
Nothing is more annoying to sophisticated people to see someone who is
rich enough to know better being tacky--unless it is to realize, a
moment later, that they probably know they are tacky and they simply
don't care and they are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and
happy, forever. Microsoft therefore bears the same relationship to
the Silicon Valley elite as the Beverly Hillbillies did to their fussy
banker, Mr. Drysdale--who is irritated not so much by the fact that
the Clampetts moved to his neighborhood as by the knowledge that, when
Jethro is seventy years old, he's still going to be talking like a
hillbilly and wearing bib overalls, and he's still going to be a lot
richer than Mr. Drysdale.
Even the hardware that Windows ran on, when compared to the machines
put out by Apple, looked like white-trash stuff, and still mostly
does. The reason was that Apple was and is a hardware company, while
Microsoft was and is a software company. Apple therefore had a
monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible
hardware came out of a free market. The free market seems to have
decided that people will not pay for cool-looking computers; PC
hardware makers who hire designers to make their stuff look
distinctive get their clocks cleaned by Taiwanese clone makers
punching out boxes that look as if they belong on cinderblocks in
front of someone's trailer. But Apple could make their hardware as
pretty as they wanted to and simply pass the higher prices on to their
besotted consumers, like me. Only last week (I am writing this
sentence in early Jan. 1999) the technology sections of all the
newspapers were filled with adulatory press coverage of how Apple had
released the iMac in several happenin' new colors like Blueberry and
Tangerine.
Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a
brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to
compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business.
Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it
up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty.
In fact the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to
open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through
little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few
months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a
certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking
tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.
This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three different
ways.
THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy
reflected a drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified
blending of hardware, operating system, and software. There is
something to this. It is hard enough to make an OS that works well on
one specific piece of hardware, designed and tested by engineers who
work down the hallway from you, in the same company. Making an OS to
work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked out by rabidly
entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the International Date
Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles people
have using Windows.
THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and
always has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from
selling hardware, and cannot exist without it.
THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate
culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full
disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations
of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am
a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour
view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and
appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel
that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting
parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully
chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how
stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their
assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove
it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as
regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move
into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower
children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the
guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a
commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and
harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for
their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably
more sinister, ways.
Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an
exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control
freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image.
Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing
suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff?
Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama
(except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able
to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious
free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened
skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious
power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain
amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.
It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the
history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad
agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent
people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for
people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has
won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they
don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon
did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to
his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two
companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple
purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow
fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people
want to believe that they are getting something for their money,
engaging in a respectable business transaction).
In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out on the
market, running on hardware platforms that were radically different
from each other--not only in the sense that MacOS used Motorola CPU
chips while Windows used Intel, but in the sense--then overlooked, but
in the long run, vastly more significant--that the Apple hardware
business was a rigid monopoly and the Windows side was a churning
free-for-all.
But the full ramifications of this did not become clear until very
recently--in fact, they are still unfolding, in remarkably strange
ways, as I'll explain when we get to Linux. The upshot is that
millions of people got accustomed to using GUIs in one form or
another. By doing so, they made Apple/Microsoft a lot of money. The
fortunes of many people have become bound up with the ability of these
companies to continue selling products whose salability is very much
open to question.
HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER
When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they ran
into criticism from both hackers and sober-sided businesspeople.
Hackers understood that software was just information, and objected to
the idea of selling it. These objections were partly moral. The
hackers were coming out of the scientific and academic world where it
is imperative to make the results of one's work freely available to
the public. They were also partly practical; how can you sell
something that can be easily copied? Businesspeople, who are polar
opposites of hackers in so many ways, had objections of their own.
Accustomed to selling toasters and insurance policies, they naturally
had a difficult time understanding how a long collection of ones and
zeroes could constitute a salable product.
Obviously Microsoft prevailed over these objections, and so did Apple.
But the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all the
hackers, the Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who
became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software that, in
1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and
founded something called the Free Software Foundation, which commenced
work on something called GNU. Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix,
but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly
IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by
AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be
extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't. Notwithstanding the
incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr. Stallman and other GNU
adherents, their project to build a free Unix to compete against
Microsoft and Apple's OSes was a little bit like trying to dig a
subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is, the advent of Linux,
which I will get to later.
But the basic idea of re-creating an operating system from scratch was
perfectly sound and completely doable. It has been done many times.
It is inherent in the very nature of operating systems.
Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no reason why
a sufficiently dedicated coder could not start from nothing with every
project and write fresh code to handle such basic, low-level
operations as controlling the read/write heads on the disk drives and
lighting up pixels on the screen. The very first computers had to be
programmed in this way. But since nearly every program needs to carry
out those same basic operations, this approach would lead to vast
duplication of effort.
Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort.
The first and most important mental habit that people develop when
they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize,
generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as
possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can
be used over and over again in different contexts. Consequently, the
development of operating systems, despite being technically
unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at its heart, an operating
system is nothing more than a library containing the most commonly
used code, written once (and hopefully written well) and then made
available to every coder who needs it.
So a proprietary, closed, secret operating system is a contradiction
in terms. It goes against the whole point of having an operating
system. And it is impossible to keep them secret anyway. The source
code--the original lines of text written by the programmers--can be
kept secret. But an OS as a whole is a collection of small
subroutines that do very specific, very clearly defined jobs. Exactly
what those subroutines do has to be made public, quite explicitly and
exactly, or else the OS is completely useless to programmers; they
can't make use of those subroutines if they don't have a complete and
perfect understanding of what the subroutines do.
The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the subroutines
do what they do. But once you know what a subroutine does, it's
generally quite easy (if you are a hacker) to write one of your own
that does exactly the same thing. It might take a while, and it is
tedious and unrewarding, but in most cases it's not really hard.
What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's deciding
what to write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have already
decided, and published their decisions.
This has been generally understood for a long time. MS-DOS was
duplicated, functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch,
called ProDOS, that did all of the same things in pretty much the same
way. In other words, another company was able to write code that did
all of the same things as MS-DOS and sell it at a profit. If you are
using the Linux OS, you can get a free program called WINE which is a
windows emulator; that is, you can open up a window on your desktop
that runs windows programs. It means that a completely functional
Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix, like a ship in a bottle.
And Unix itself, which is vastly more sophisticated than MS-DOS, has
been built up from scratch many times over. Versions of it are sold
by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and others.
People have, in other words, been re-writing basic OS code for so long
that all of the technology that constituted an "operating system" in
the traditional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so cheap and
common that it's literally free. Not only could Gates and Allen not
sell MS-DOS today, they could not even give it away, because much more
powerful OSes are already being given away. Even the original Windows
(which was the only windows until 1995) has become worthless, in that
there is no point in owning something that can be emulated inside of
Linux--which is, itself, free.
In this way the OS business is very different from, say, the car
business. Even an old rundown car has some value. You can use it for
making runs to the dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate of
manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and
have to compete against more modern products.
But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.
Microsoft is a great software applications company.
Applications--such as Microsoft Word--are an area where innovation
brings real, direct, tangible benefits to users. The innovations
might be new technology straight from the research department, or they
might be in the category of bells and whistles, but in any event they
are frequently useful and they seem to make users happy. And
Microsoft is in the process of becoming a great research company. But
Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company. And this is
not necessarily because their operating systems are all that bad from
a purely technological standpoint. Microsoft's OSes do have their
problems, sure, but they are vastly better than they used to be, and
they are adequate for most people.
Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating
systems company? Because the very nature of operating systems is such
that it is senseless for them to be developed and owned by a specific
company. It's a thankless job to begin with. Applications create
possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose
limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will
forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the
high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big problem is
understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get hacked by coders
who are annoyed by their limitations. The OS business has been good
to Microsoft only insofar as it has given them the money they needed
to launch a really good applications software business and to hire a
lot of smart researchers. Now it really ought to be jettisoned, like
a spent booster stage from a rocket. The big question is whether
Microsoft is capable of doing this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in
the same way as Apple is to selling hardware?
Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware
supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over
Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger
position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet.
The problem, for Apple, was that most of the world's computer users
ended up owning cheaper hardware. But cheap hardware couldn't run
MacOS, and so these people switched to Windows.
Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple" with
"Microsoft" and you can see the same thing about to happen all over
again. Microsoft dominates the OS market, which makes them money and
seems like a great idea for now. But cheaper and better OSes are
available, and they are growingly popular in parts of the world that
are not so saturated with computers as the US. Ten years from now,
most of the world's computer users may end up owning these cheaper
OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any Microsoft
applications, and so these people will use something else.
To put it more directly: every time someone decides to use a
non-Microsoft OS, Microsoft's OS division, obviously, loses a
customer. But, as things stand now, Microsoft's applications division
loses a customer too. This is not such a big deal as long as almost
everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as soon as Windows' market share
begins to slip, the math starts to look pretty dismal for the people
in Redmond.
This argument could be countered by saying that Microsoft could simply
re-compile its applications to run under other OSes. But this
strategy goes against most normal corporate instincts. Again the case
of Apple is instructive. When things started to go south for Apple,
they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they
didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant
hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But
this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these
special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end.
Likewise, when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened,
their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features
into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software
applications to exploit those special features. But this will only
have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with
declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.
The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of
despond. There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and Microsoft.
(1) each of these companies is in what we would call a co-dependency
relationship with their customers. The customers Want To Believe, and
Apple and Microsoft know how to give them what they want. (2) each
company works very hard to add new features to their OSes, which works
to secure customer loyalty, at least for a little while.
Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about those
two topics.
THE TECHNOSPHERE
Unix is the only OS remaining whose GUI (a vast suite of code called
the X Windows System) is separate from the OS in the old sense of the
phrase. This is to say that you can run Unix in pure command-line
mode if you want to, with no windows, icons, mouses, etc. whatsoever,
and it will still be Unix and capable of doing everything Unix is
supposed to do. But the other OSes: MacOS, the Windows family, and
BeOS, have their GUIs tangled up with the old-fashioned OS functions
to the extent that they have to run in GUI mode, or else they are not
really running. So it's no longer really possible to think of GUIs as
being distinct from the OS; they're now an inextricable part of the
OSes that they belong to--and they are by far the largest part, and by
far the most expensive and difficult part to create.
There are only two ways to sell a product: price and features. When
OSes are free, OS companies cannot compete on price, and so they
compete on features. This means that they are always trying to outdo
each other writing code that, until recently, was not considered to be
part of an OS at all: stuff like GUIs. This explains a lot about how
these companies behave.
It explains why Microsoft added a browser to their OS, for example.
It is easy to get free browsers, just as to get free OSes. If
browsers are free, and OSes are free, it would seem that there is no
way to make money from browsers or OSes. But if you can integrate a
browser into the OS and thereby imbue both of them with new features,
you have a salable product.
Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes government
anti-trust lawyers really mad, this strategy makes sense. At least,
it makes sense if you assume (as Microsoft's management appears to)
that the OS has to be protected at all costs. The real question is
whether every new technological trend that comes down the pike ought
to be used as a crutch to maintain the OS's dominant position.
Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft had to develop a really
good web browser, and they did. But then they had a choice: they
could have made that browser work on many different OSes, which would
give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet world no matter what
happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the browser one
with the OS, gambling that this would make the OS look so modern and
sexy that it would help to preserve their dominance in that market.
The problem is that when Microsoft's OS position begins to erode (and
since it is currently at something like ninety percent, it can't go
anywhere but down) it will drag everything else down with it.
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all
life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which
is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold
dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in
a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already
become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or
that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like
the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what
is above and what is below.
But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is
possible to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled
upon skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In
theory they go all the way back to the first single-celled organisms.
And if you use your imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you
hang around long enough, you'll become fossilized there too, and in
time some more advanced organism will become fossilized on top of you.
The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the
Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking
(possibly illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft
must get used to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of
throwing millions of dollars into the development of new technologies,
such as Web browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software
show up on the Internet two years, or a year, or even just a few
months, later.
By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their
products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process,
but on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea,
using all their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out
of the sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them.
Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping
feet at one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has those.
But trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep you alive
for so long. The danger is that in their obsession with staying out
of the fossil beds, these companies will forget about what lies above
the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In other words, they must
hang onto their primitive weapons and crude competitive instincts, but
also evolve powerful brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is
doing with its research division, which has been hiring smart people
right and left (Here I should mention that although I know, and
socialize with, several people in that company's research division, we
never talk about business issues and I have little to no idea what the
hell they are up to. I have learned much more about Microsoft by
using the Linux operating system than I ever would have done by using
Windows).
Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its
money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual
sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the
price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other
words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on
simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by
taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in
different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges
on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for
next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become
free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both
hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about
price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about
price gradients over time in a given place.
So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost daily,
in the hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical innovations,
combined with the "I want to believe" phenomenon, will prevent their
customers from looking across the road towards the cheaper and better
OSes that are available to them. The question is whether this makes
sense in the long run. If Microsoft is addicted to OSes as Apple is
to hardware, then they will bet the whole farm on their OSes, and tie
all of their new applications and technologies to them. Their
continued survival will then depend on these two things: adding more
features to their OSes so that customers will not switch to the
cheaper alternatives, and maintaining the image that, in some
mysterious way, gives those customers the feeling that they are
getting something for their money.
The latter is a truly strange and interesting cultural phenomenon.
THE INTERFACE CULTURE
A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was
presented with the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a young
couple were standing in front of a large cosmetics display. The man
was stolidly holding a shopping basket between his hands while his
mate raked blister-packs of makeup off the display and piled them in.
Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of
an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be
dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist
on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay
money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to
us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with
cosmetics.
I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the
Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect
gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle.
It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in
front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed
of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze
at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which
televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was
holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his
view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid
money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye
he was watching it on television.
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and
I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going
to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as
a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of
GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated
experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and
why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
In the part of Disney World called the Animal Kingdom there is a new
attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah Jungle
Trek. It was open for sneak previews when I was there. This is a
complete stone-by-stone reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the
jungles of India. According to its backstory, it was built by a local
rajah in the 16th Century as a game reserve. He would go there with
his princely guests to hunt Bengal tigers. As time went on it fell
into disrepair and the tigers and monkeys took it over; eventually,
around the time of India's independence, it became a government
wildlife reserve, now open to visitors.
The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual
building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls
are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for
centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just
so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where
modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they've been
done, not as Disney's engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian
janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar.
The rust is painted on, or course, and protected from real rust by a
plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless you get down on your
knees.
In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old pitted
friezes carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off and
settled into the earth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten
earthquake, and so a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two,
but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a
flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life
surrounded by diverse animals. This is an obvious allusion (or, in
showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates
the center of Disney's Animal Kingdom just as the Castle dominates the
Magic Kingdom or the Sphere does Epcot. But it's rendered in
historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn't
have a Ph.D. in Indian art history.
The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree
of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The
one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal
wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his
stupidity.
The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow
back, but now Man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other
animals in standing around to adore and praise it.
It is, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck: the scenario,
commonly espoused among modern-day environmentalists, that the world
faces an upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations that will
last for a few decades or centuries and end when we find a new
harmonious modus vivendi with Nature.
Taken as a whole the frieze is a pretty brilliant piece of work.
Obviously it's not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or people
now living deserve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the
Maharajah's game reserve at Disney World. There are no signatures on
anything, because it would ruin the whole effect to have long strings
of production credits dangling from every custom-worn brick, as they
do from Hollywood movies.
Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real
wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the
business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror
that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a writer
is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an
ambience or presenting them with something to look at; and just as the
command-line interface opens a much more direct and explicit channel
from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with words, writer, and
reader.
The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the
only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the
devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney
World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers,
because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity.
The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to
print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken
that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt
is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them
are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words,
or no words at all, are for the commoners).
But this special quality of words and of written communication would
have the same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted graffiti on
a magic mirror. So Disney does most of its communication without
resorting to words, and for the most part, the words aren't missed.
Some of Disney's older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh,
and Alice in Wonderland, came out of books. But the authors' names
are rarely if ever mentioned, and you can't buy the original books at
the Disney store. If you could, they would all seem old and queer,
like very bad knockoffs of the purer, more authentic Disney versions.
Compared to more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast and
Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books (particularly Alice in
Wonderland and Peter Pan) seem deeply bizarre, and not wholly
appropriate for children. That stands to reason, because Lewis
Carroll and J.M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature
of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight
through all the layers of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall.
Probably for this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying
books altogether, and now finds its themes and characters in folk
tales, which have the lapidary, time-worn quality of the ancient
bricks in the Maharajah's ruins.
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to
Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books.
Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being
presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with
environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk
your ear off about biology.
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would
be the sort of unsigned folk art that's for sale in Disney World's
African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem
comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive
popular acceptance, or both.
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone
carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away
into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is
awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that
we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are
communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire
culture.
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a
reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is
that the execution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole
environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the
translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the
attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can't argue with it.
It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if
Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting
away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from
the command-line interface to the GUI.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting
laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed
interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more
than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be
applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at
staggering expense.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing
graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of
both Microsoft and Disney?
Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more
complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to
cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to
delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at
Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for
us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged
executive summary.
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this
century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places
like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip
on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the
intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and
turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used
to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point
during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have
inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set
of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But
we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like
intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more,
though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with
propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a
process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to
some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local
arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them,
just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them
that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist,
they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse
languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for
human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values
through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious
risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we
have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely
important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill
of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow
pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over
the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force
Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach
Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy
has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's
civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads
of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can
come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam,
this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is
obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our
arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that
are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend
to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of
multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call
it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting
(and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is
wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing
beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is
that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist
peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary
for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our
suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern
culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus
Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the
message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our
media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of
course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority
figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are
hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to
be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make
judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real
culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The
ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point
of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns
sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into
Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force
Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the
bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of
the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards
of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly
inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it
is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is
actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than
this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up
watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an
atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching
bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where
postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional
notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as
one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all
this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you
end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and
understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture
you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.
In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law
firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level.
They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and
non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way.
I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have
moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and
there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of
kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any
suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who
hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who
think the same way.
And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own
children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are
vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their
time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what
responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to
book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse,
eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and
show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando.
You may be asking: what the hell does all this have to do with
operating systems? As I've explained, there is no way to explain the
domination of the OS market by Apple/Microsoft without looking to
cultural explanations, and so I can't get anywhere, in this essay,
without first letting you know where I'm coming from vis-a-vis
contemporary culture.
Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the
Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned
upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class,
supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological
wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The
Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because
they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi
learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic
media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many
ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong
direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost
unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected
by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of
taking stands.
Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details,
go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial
Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain
their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and
tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary
bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot,
because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline
tickets, but that's no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and
will gladly pay for it all.
Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to
the point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a
tantrum about those unlettered philistines. As if I were a
self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying
the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable
stone--the original command-line interface--and blowing his stack at
the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images. Not only that,
but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of conspiracy theory.
But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I describe,
here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily
bad now:
It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to
comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it
dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million
Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a
thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on
"real" ones in Kenya. The boundary between these two classes is more
porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular
dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in
general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary
for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things.
Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got
sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in
religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed
on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad
education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose
chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise.
The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who
actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud
Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for
real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries
controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed
intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable
places to live. Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque
entertainments as pat and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that
is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal
level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then
how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and
my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just
about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly
adorable cartoon characters. My own family--the people I know
best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read
this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for
sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted
than the other.
MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD
Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all
Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols
and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all
ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished
laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on
their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and
machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the
responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to
the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility
and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear
instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it
without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we
may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number
of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us,
this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it
can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.
The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving
device that tries to translate humans' vaguely expressed intentions
into bits. In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder
responsibilities that have always been considered the province of
human beings--we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate
our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle
routine chores without being asked, to remind us of what we ought to
be reminded of while filtering out noise.
At the upper (which is to say, closer to the user) levels, this is
done through a set of conventions--menus, buttons, and so on. These
work in the sense that analogies work: they help Eloi understand
abstract or unfamiliar concepts by likening them to something known.
But the loftier word "metaphor" is used.
The overarching concept of the MacOS was the "desktop metaphor" and it
subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least
mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called "document")
is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a
"desktop"). The window is almost always too small to contain the
document and so you "move around," or, more pretentiously, "navigate"
in the document by "clicking and dragging" the "thumb" on the "scroll
bar." When you "type" (using a keyboard) or "draw" (using a "mouse")
into the "window" or use pull-down "menus" and "dialog boxes" to
manipulate its contents, the results of your labors get stored (at
least in theory) in a "file," and later you can pull the same
information back up into another "window." When you don't want it
anymore, you "drag" it into the "trash."
There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here, and I
could deconstruct it 'til the cows come home, but I won't. Consider
only one word: "document." When we document something in the real
world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But
computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data.
Sometimes (as when you've just opened or saved them) the document as
portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored, under the same
name, in a file on the disk, but other times (as when you have made
changes without saving them) it is completely different. In any case,
every time you hit "Save" you annihilate the previous version of the
"document" and replace it with whatever happens to be in the window at
the moment. So even the word "save" is being used in a sense that is
grotesquely misleading---"destroy one version, save another" would be
more accurate.
Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the
experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then
losing it because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until
the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems
every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on
paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and
irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user is left with
a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyance) stemming
from a kind of metaphor shear--you realize that you've been living and
thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus.
So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad
metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process
of learning new definitions of words like "window" and "document" and
"save" that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically
opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well,
at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that
Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other
modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by
users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort
of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI
operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a
few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European
plumbing--but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf
the web.
Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are
comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and
feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not
especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or
writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of
metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the
underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the
world.
Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives
computers numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world:
making paper spew out of printers, causing words to appear on screens
thousands of miles away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer
patients, creating realistic moving pictures of the Titanic. Windows
is now used as an OS for cash registers and bank tellers' terminals.
My satellite TV system uses a sort of GUI to change channels and show
program guides. Modern cellular telephones have a crude GUI built
into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can buy a Lego
set called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego robots and
program them through a GUI on your computer.
So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a
glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for
dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that
make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people
without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The
internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but
useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering
wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of
gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up
what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been
invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin
up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen
instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of
a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:
PARK --- REVERSE --- NEUTRAL ---- 3 2 1 --- Help...
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any
imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases
the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a
miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it
would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't
be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the
gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it
if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era
when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn.
Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up
whatever interface was best suited to the task of driving an
automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial
telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most
people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but
also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from
a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb.
But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with
features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you
are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety
percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or
cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small
benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of
having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for
makers of consumer goods, because they can't compete without offering
features.
It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user
interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the
automobile, partly because it's too expensive and partly because
ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented
a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumbwheel to adjust
the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse and
a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the cassettes. It would
have had a big analog clock on the front of it, and you would have set
the time by moving the hands around on the dial. But because the VCR
was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward transitional period
between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs--it just had a bunch
of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to
push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed
reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many
users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that
appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking
twelve problem". When they talk about it, though, they usually aren't
talking about VCRs.
Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which
means that you can set the time and control other features through a
sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course,
but they also have other types of virtual controls, like radio
buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars.
Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier, for
many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of the
machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing from
America's living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has moved on to
plague other technologies.
So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers,
and become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for
every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit,
but having an ideal, or even a good interface is no longer the
priority; the important thing now is having some kind of interface
that customers will actually use, so that manufacturers can claim,
with a straight face, that they are offering new features.
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are
easy-- or at least the GUI makes it seem that way Of course, nothing
is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it
does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be
easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel,
but it would be incredibly dangerous.
By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise
that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them
bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated
things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to
understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written
according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces:
"The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the
author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile
generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to
think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically
involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we stick to
simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so
bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies,
we inevitably run into the problem of:
METAPHOR SHEAR
I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released
around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better
tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I
wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on
floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first
hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word
came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made
sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.
Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old,
circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0
It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an
earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able
to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the
document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run
through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by
spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.
Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this
sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go
along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter
programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer
whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of
written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There
are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is
that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be
unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the
stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my
brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform
tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and
identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly
the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch
power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few
twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to
exist.
Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the
Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so
the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible
for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as
text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple
telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had
allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options
that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them
practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my
documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look;
all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or
less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence.
Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even
prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents
had ceased to exist.
It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as
if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and
art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the
Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story
in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from
dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left
behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine
parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this
way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these
sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words
chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't
really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at
this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my
Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.
LINUX
During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time
programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several
hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's
Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the
premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's
own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far
more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and
that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual
program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had
high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot
high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to build
during the endless installation process. The first time I launched
MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia
showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of being
intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could type
simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines
of text as commands, and try to execute them.
It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line
interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands,
which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to
use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I began
messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command line
interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix.
In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when
they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd
gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that
they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I
simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's
hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was
an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster
even came out onto the market.
Even before my Powerbook crashed and obliterated my big file in July
1995, there had been danger signs. An old college buddy of mine, who
starts and runs high-tech companies in Boston, had developed a
commercial product using Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the
Macs were high-performance graphics terminals, chosen for their sweet
user interface, giving users access to a large database of graphical
information stored on a network of much more powerful, but less
user-friendly, computers. This fellow was the second person who
turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way, and through the mid-1980's we
had shared the thrill of being high-tech cognoscenti, using superior
Apple technology in a world of DOS-using knuckleheads. Early versions
of my friend's system had worked well, he told me, but when several
machines joined the network, mysterious crashes began to occur;
sometimes the whole network would just freeze. It was one of those
bugs that could not be reproduced easily. Finally they figured out
that these network crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning
the menus for a particular item, held down the mouse button for more
than a couple of seconds.
Fundamentally, the MacOS could only do one thing at a time. Drawing a
menu on the screen is one thing. So when a menu was pulled down, the
Macintosh was not capable of doing anything else until that indecisive
user released the button.
This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process machine
(although it's a fairly bad thing), but it's no good in a machine that
is on a network, because being on a network implies some kind of
continual low-level interaction with other machines. By failing to
respond to the network, the Mac caused a network-wide crash.
In order to work with other computers, and with networks, and with
various different types of hardware, an OS must be incomparably more
complicated and powerful than either MS-DOS or the original MacOS.
The only way of connecting to the Internet that's worth taking
seriously is PPP, the Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never mind the
details) makes your computer--temporarily--a full-fledged member of
the Global Internet, with its own unique address, and various
privileges, powers, and responsibilities appertaining thereunto.
Technically it means your machine is running the TCP/IP protocol,
which, to make a long story short, revolves around sending packets of
data back and forth, in no particular order, and at unpredictable
times, according to a clever and elegant set of rules. But sending a
packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that can only do one thing
at a time cannot simultaneously be part of the Internet and do
anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor
reserved for Serious Computers--mainframes and high-powered
minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings--and so the
protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using
it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to
put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS
was originally built with that in mind, and so when the Internet got
hot, radical changes had to be made.
When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my
old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would
have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft,
or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating
systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were
best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same
time.
The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995.
I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to
work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single
floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The
PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.
It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company
called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I
took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were
Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files
and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most
of the file back.
As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were
unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was
completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard
disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old,
discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor
shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching
the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car
wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath
the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood.
I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities in
some kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three
weirdly synchronistic things happened.
(1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for a quick
visit along with his family--he was recovering from back surgery at
the time. He had some hot gossip: "Windows 95 mastered today." What
this meant was that Microsoft's new operating system had, on this day,
been placed on a special compact disk known as a golden master, which
would be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in preparation for its
thunderous release a few weeks later. This news was received
peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities, including one whose
office door was plastered with the usual assortment of cartoons and
novelties, e.g.
(2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering
corporate software engineer, encounters a portly, bearded, hairy man
of a certain age--a bit like Santa Claus, but darker, with a certain
edge about him. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his
appearance and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain
mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert jabs weakly at
the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames; the Unix hacker
listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm, then, in the last
frame, reaches into his pocket. "Here's a nickel, kid," he says, "go
buy yourself a real computer."
(3) the owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes.
Barnes was known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the subject
of operating systems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who revered the
Macintosh, considering it to be a true hacker's machine, Barnes was
fond of pointing out that the Mac, with its hermetically sealed
architecture, was actually hostile to hackers, who are prone to
tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By contrast, the
IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be taken apart and
plugged back together, was much more hackable.
So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of
many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract,
Platonic ideal called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing
over to a new OS, because my credit cards were still smoking from all
the money I'd spent on Mac hardware over the years. But Linux's great
virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same sort of
hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which is to say, the cheapest hardware
in existence. As if to demonstrate why this was a great idea, I was,
within a week or two of returning home, able to get my hand on a
then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free, because I knew a guy
who worked in an office where they were simply being thrown away.
Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in, and
began switching cards around. If something didn't work, I went to a
used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full of components and
bought a new card for a few bucks.
The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an
unintended consequence of decisions that had been made more than a
decade earlier by IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and
brought the GUI to a much larger market, the hardware regime changed:
the cost of color video cards and high-resolution monitors began to
drop, and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to hardware
meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compared to MacOS. But the
GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that volume went way up
and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wanted a clean,
integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing hardware,
had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly because their
beautiful hardware cost so much.
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics
and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural
price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood
and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of
its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker
types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while
Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created
a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually
self-assembled into Linux.
THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS
Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the
operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it
only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon
suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only
get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich
agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the
onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition)
flat.
It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without
going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can
be explained by telling a story about drills.
The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you
look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills
but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for
homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a
cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle
sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube
contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the
handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you
are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole
Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight
off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle
(provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the
other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to
operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically
designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a
foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with
a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to
the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.
During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another
worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we
were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the
Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point,
the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one
and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around
like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down.
Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged
in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until
someone came along and reinstated the ladder.
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it
did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few
six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I
chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down
between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the
first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and
whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest
obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a
spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun
itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel
pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded
by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw
itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such
run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began
to pound with atavistic terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is
dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not
bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill,
and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built
into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The
danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to
envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different
reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that
is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is
like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his
master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited
power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware
stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller
low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively,
wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with
such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real
drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional
tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they
have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully
designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and
power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that
I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks.
It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone
who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill
other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and
most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as
such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind
of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner
referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were
mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor
would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about
his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.
Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like
Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other
people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who
grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to
write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they
cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems
seriously.
THE ORAL TRADITION
Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple
small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing
some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has
already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file
or directory or command that you have noticed but never really
understood before.
For example there is a command (a small program, part of the OS)
called whoami, which enables you to ask the computer who it thinks you
are. On a Unix machine, you are always logged in under some
name--possibly even your own! What files you may work with, and what
software you may use, depends on your identity. When I started out
using Linux, I was on a non-networked machine in my basement, with
only one user account, and so when I became aware of the whoami
command it struck me as ludicrous. But once you are logged in as one
person, you can temporarily switch over to a pseudonym in order to
access different files. If your machine is on the Internet, you can
log onto other computers, provided you have a user name and a
password. At that point the distant machine becomes no different in
practice from the one right in front of you. These changes in
identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many
layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you
have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is
indispensible. I use it all the time.
The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general structure.
On your flimsy operating systems, you can create directories (folders)
and give them names like Frodo or My Stuff and put them pretty much
anywhere you like. But under Unix the highest level--the root--of the
filesystem is always designated with the single character "/" and it
always contains the same set of top-level directories:
/usr /etc /var /bin /proc /boot /home /root /sbin /dev /lib /tmp
and each of these directories typically has its own distinct structure
of subdirectories. Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and
avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to
whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long
names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a
river.
This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above
directories exists, and what is contained in it. At first it all
seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately obscure. When I started
using Linux I was accustomed to being able to create directories
wherever I wanted and to give them whatever names struck my fancy.
Under Unix you are free to do that, of course (you are free to do
anything) but as you gain experience with the system you come to
understand that the directories listed above were created for the best
of reasons and that your life will be much easier if you follow along
(within /home, by the way, you have pretty much unlimited freedom).
After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand
times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees
that it wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of
acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system,
and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in
the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by
engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is
not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was
that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by
heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal
embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments
were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished,
improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix
is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be
re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very
difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of
OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.
Many hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations
of the Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments. Some of
them die out quickly, some are merged with similar, parallel
innovations created by different hackers attacking the same problem,
others still are embraced, and adopted into the epic. Thus Unix has
slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of
complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a
tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is
more like anatomy than physics.
For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing
about it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch
of hackers had got together an implentation of Unix that could be
downloaded, free of charge, from the Internet. For a long time I
could not bring myself to take the notion seriously. It was like
hearing rumors that a group of model rocket enthusiasts had created a
completely functional Saturn V by exchanging blueprints on the Net and
mailing valves and flanges to each other.
But it's true. Credit for Linux generally goes to its human namesake,
one Linus Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole thing rolling in 1991
when he used some of the GNU tools to write the beginnings of a Unix
kernel that could run on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds
deserves all the credit he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But
he could not have made it happen by himself, any more than Richard
Stallman could have. To write code at all, Torvalds had to have cheap
but powerful development tools, and these he got from Stallman's GNU
project.
And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that code. Cheap
hardware is a much harder thing to arrange than cheap software; a
single person (Stallman) can write software and put it up on the Net
for free, but in order to make hardware it's necessary to have a whole
industrial infrastructure, which is not cheap by any stretch of the
imagination. Really the only way to make hardware cheap is to punch
out an incredible number of copies of it, so that the unit cost
eventually drops. For reasons already explained, Apple had no desire
to see the cost of hardware drop. The only reason Torvalds had cheap
hardware was Microsoft.
Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business, insisted on making
its software run on hardware that anyone could build, and thereby
created the market conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet.
In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look
not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus
Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these
three and Linux would not exist.
OS SHOCK
Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and
visit some other part of the world typically go through several stages
of culture shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a
tentative engagement with the new country's manners, cuisine, public
transit systems and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous
confidence that they are instant experts on the new country. As the
visit wears on, homesickness begins to set in, and the traveler begins
to appreciate, for the first time, how much he or she took for granted
at home. At the same time it begins to seem obvious that many of
one's own cultures and traditions are essentially arbitrary, and could
have been different; driving on the right side of the road, for
example. When the traveler returns home and takes stock of the
experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about America
than about the country they went to visit.
For the same reasons, Linux is worth trying. It is a strange country
indeed, but you don't have to live there; a brief sojourn suffices to
give some flavor of the place and--more importantly--to lay bare
everything that is taken for granted, and all that could have been
done differently, under Windows or MacOS.
You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS, installing
it would be a straightforward transaction: in exchange for money, some
company would give you a CD-ROM, and you would be on your way. But a
lot is subsumed in that kind of transaction, and has to be gone
through and picked apart.
We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America.
If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part
of the taxi driver's life; he refuses to take your money because it
would demean your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps
hot tears when you get in some other guy's taxi. You end up meeting
his kids at some point, and have to devote all sort of ingenuity to
finding some way to compensate him without insulting his honor. It is
exhausting. Sometimes you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi
ride.
But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go
out and hail a taxi and be on your way, there must exist a whole
hidden apparatus of medallions, inspectors, commissions, and so
forth--which is fine as long as taxis are cheap and you can always get
one. When the system fails to work in some way, it is mysterious and
infuriating and turns otherwise reasonable people into conspiracy
theorists. But when the Egyptian system breaks down, it breaks down
transparently. You can't get a taxi, but your driver's nephew will
show up, on foot, to explain the problem and apologize.
Microsoft and Apple do things the Manhattan way, with vast complexity
hidden behind a wall of interface. Linux does things the Egypt way,
with vast complexity strewn about all over the landscape. If you've
just flown in from Manhattan, your first impulse will be to throw up
your hands and say "For crying out loud! Will you people get a grip
on yourselves!?" But this does not make friends in Linux-land any
better than it would in Egypt.
You can suck Linux right out of the air, as it were, by downloading
the right files and putting them in the right places, but there
probably are not more than a few hundred people in the world who could
create a functioning Linux system in that way. What you really need
is a distribution of Linux, which means a prepackaged set of files.
But distributions are a separate thing from Linux per se.
Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a
self-organizing Net subculture. The end result of its collective
lucubrations is a vast body of source code, almost all written in C
(the dominant computer programming language). "Source code" just
means a computer program as typed in and edited by some hacker. If
it's in C, the file name will probably have .c or .cpp on the end of
it, depending on which dialect was used; if it's in some other
language it will have some other suffix. Frequently these sorts of
files can be found in a directory with the name /src which is the
hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of "source."
Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to
most users, but they are of gigantic cultural and political
significance, because Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux
makes them public. They are the family jewels. They are the sort of
thing that in Hollywood thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium
bomb core, the top-secret blueprints, the suitcase of bearer bonds,
the reel of microfilm. If the source files for Windows or MacOS were
made public on the Net, then those OSes would become free, like
Linux--only not as good, because no one would be around to fix bugs
and answer questions. Linux is "open source" software meaning,
simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you do; it wants
object code. Object code files typically have the suffix .o and are
unreadable all but a few, highly strange humans, because they consist
of ones and zeroes. Accordingly, this sort of file commonly shows up
in a directory with the name /bin, for "binary."
Source files are simply ASCII text files. ASCII denotes a particular
way of encoding letters into bit patterns. In an ASCII file, each
character has eight bits all to itself. This creates a potential
"alphabet" of 256 distinct characters, in that eight binary digits can
form that many unique patterns. In practice, of course, we tend to
limit ourselves to the familiar letters and digits. The bit-patterns
used to represent those letters and digits are the same ones that were
physically punched into the paper tape by my high school teletype,
which in turn were the same one used by the telegraph industry for
decades previously. ASCII text files, in other words, are telegrams,
and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same
reason they are eternal, because the code never changes, and
universal, because every text editing and word processing software
ever written knows about this code.
Therefore just about any software can be used to create, edit, and
read source code files. Object code files, then, are created from
these source files by a piece of software called a compiler, and
forged into a working application by another piece of software called
a linker.
The triad of editor, compiler, and linker, taken together, form the
core of a software development system. Now, it is possible to spend a
lot of money on shrink-wrapped development systems with lovely
graphical user interfaces and various ergonomic enhancements. In some
cases it might even be a good and reasonable way to spend money. But
on this side of the road, as it were, the very best software is
usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler and linker are to hackers
what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were to the Mongols. Hackers
live in the saddle, and hack on their own tools even while they are
using them to create new applications. It is quite inconceivable that
superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of
paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers
in the world they are simply outnumbered.
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the
minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the
maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a
thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman;
enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer
language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits
straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no
underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of
Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the
ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate
memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity
on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are
a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry
about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all
other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday
sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply
makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can
use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also
available on the Net for free.
I could say a lot about emacs and TeX, but right now I am trying to
tell a story about how to actually install Linux on your machine. The
hard-core survivalist approach would be to download an editor like
emacs, and the GNU Tools--the compiler and linker--which are polished
and excellent to the same degree as emacs. Equipped with these, one
would be able to start downloading ASCII source code files (/src) and
compiling them into binary object code files (/bin) that would run on
the machine. But in order to even arrive at this point--to get emacs
running, for example--you have to have Linux actually up and running
on your machine. And even a minimal Linux operating system requires
thousands of binary files all acting in concert, and arranged and
linked together just so.
Several entities have therefore taken it upon themselves to create
"distributions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt analogy slightly,
these entities are a bit like tour guides who meet you at the airport,
who speak your language, and who help guide you through the initial
culture shock. If you are an Egyptian, of course, you see it the
other way; tour guides exist to keep brutish outlanders from traipsing
through your mosques and asking you the same questions over and over
and over again.
Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations, such as Red
Hat Software, which makes a Linux distribution called Red Hat that has
a relatively commercial sheen to it. In most cases you put a Red Hat
CD-ROM into your PC and reboot and it handles the rest. Just as a
tour guide in Egypt will expect some sort of compensation for his
services, commercial distributions need to be paid for. In most cases
they cost almost nothing and are well worth it.
I use a distribution called Debian (the word is a contraction of
"Deborah" and "Ian") which is non-commercial. It is organized (or
perhaps I should say "it has organized itself") along the same lines
as Linux in general, which is to say that it consists of volunteers
who collaborate over the Net, each responsible for looking after a
different chunk of the system. These people have broken Linux down
into a number of packages, which are compressed files that can be
downloaded to an already functioning Debian Linux system, then opened
up and unpacked using a free installer application. Of course, as
such, Debian has no commercial arm--no distribution mechanism. You
can download all Debian packages over the Net, but most people will
want to have them on a CD-ROM. Several different companies have taken
it upon themselves to decoct all of the current Debian packages onto
CD-ROMs and then sell them. I buy mine from Linux Systems Labs. The
cost for a three-disc set, containing Debian in its entirety, is less
than three dollars. But (and this is an important distinction) not a
single penny of that three dollars is going to any of the coders who
created Linux, nor to the Debian packagers. It goes to Linux Systems
Labs and it pays, not for the software, or the packages, but for the
cost of stamping out the CD-ROMs.
Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever hack for
circumventing the normal boot process and causing your computer, when
it is turned on, to organize itself, not as a PC running Windows, but
as a "host" running Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time
you see it, but completely harmless. When a PC boots up, it goes
through a little self-test routine, taking an inventory of available
disks and memory, and then begins looking around for a disk to boot up
from. In any normal Windows computer that disk will be a hard drive.
But if you have your system configured right, it will look first for a
floppy or CD-ROM disk, and boot from that if one is available.
Linux exploits this chink in the defenses. Your computer notices a
bootable disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive, loads in some object code
from that disk, and blindly begins to execute it. But this is not
Microsoft or Apple code, this is Linux code, and so at this point your
computer begins to behave very differently from what you are
accustomed to. Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If
you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a
"Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue
sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram
printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no
"welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable
menace of graffiti tags.
Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.0.30. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: No module symbols loaded. Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Intel MultiProcessor Specification v1.4 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: Virtual Wire compatibility mode. Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: OEM ID: INTEL Product ID: 440FX APIC at: 0xFEE00000 Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #0 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version
17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #1 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC
version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: I/O APIC #2 Version 17 at
0xFEC00000. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processors: 2 Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: 16 point font, 400 scans Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual console
(max 63) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service
Directory structure at 0x000fdb70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory entry at 0xfdb80 Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at
0xfdba1 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardware. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Warning : Unknown PCI device (10b7:9001).
Please read include/linux/pci.h Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: Memory: 64268k/66556k available (700k kernel code, 384k
reserved, 1204k data) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea
University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035. Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society TCP/IP
for NET3.034 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP,
TCP Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 386/387 coupling... Ok,
fpu using exception 16 error reporting. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev
kernel: Linux version 2.0.30 (root@theRev) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #15
Fri Mar 27 16:37:24 PST 1998 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Booting
processor 1 stack 00002000: Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40
BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Total of 2 processors
activated (358.81 BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Serial
driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel:
PS/2 auxiliary pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.07 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: loop: registered device at major 7 Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec
14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15
theRev kernel: hda: Conner Peripherals 1275MB - CFS1275A, 1219MB
w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=619/64/63 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdb:
Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA, CHS=8928/15/63, DMA Dec 14
15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: FDC 0
is a National Semiconductor PC87306 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md
driver 0.35 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel:
PPP: version 2.2.0 (dynamic channel allocation) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: TCP compression code copyright 1989 Regents of the University
of California Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP Dynamic channel
allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera, Inc. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: PPP line discipline registered. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev
kernel: SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels,
max=256). Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang
10Mbps/Combo at 0xef00, 00:60:08:a4:3c:db, IRQ 10 Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10base2 interface.
Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and
whole-frame receives. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.49
1/2/98 Donald Becker
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: Partition check: Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hda:
hda1 hda2 hda3 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15
11:58:06 theRev kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Adding Swap: 16124k swap-space
(priority -1) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: EXT2-fs warning: maximal
mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended Dec 15 11:58:06
theRev kernel: hdc: media changed Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel:
ISO9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A Dec 15 11:58:07 theRev syslogd
1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Unable to open
options file /etc/diald/diald.options: No such file or directory Dec
15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device specified. You must have at
least one device! Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define a
connector script (option 'connect'). Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev
diald[87]: You must define the remote ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09
theRev diald[87]: You must define the local ip address. Dec 15
11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Terminating due to damaged reconfigure.
The only parts of this that are readable, for normal people, are the
error messages and warnings. And yet it's noteworthy that Linux
doesn't stop, or crash, when it encounters an error; it spits out a
pithy complaint, gives up on whatever processes were damaged, and
keeps on rolling. This was decidedly not true of the early versions
of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for the simple reason that an OS that is
not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time cannot
possibly recover from errors. Looking for, and dealing with, errors
requires a separate process running in parallel with the one that has
erred. A kind of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye on all of
the others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS and
Windows can do more than one thing at a time they are much better at
dealing with errors than they used to be, but they are not even close
to Linux or other Unices in this respect; and their greater complexity
has made them vulnerable to new types of errors.
FALLIBILITY, ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION, TRUST, AND OTHER ARCANE TECHNICAL
CONCEPTS
Linux is not capable of having any centrally organized policies
dictating how to write error messages and documentation, and so each
programmer writes his own. Usually they are in English even though
tons of Linux programmers are Europeans. Frequently they are funny.
Always they are honest. If something bad has happened because the
software simply isn't finished yet, or because the user screwed
something up, this will be stated forthrightly. The command line
interface makes it easy for programs to dribble out little comments,
warnings, and messages here and there. Even if the application is
imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a
little S.O.S. message. Sometimes when you finish working with a
program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of
mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line
interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were
chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working
with it.
Documentation, under Linux, comes in the form of man (short for
manual) pages. You can access these either through a GUI (xman) or
from the command line (man). Here is a sample from the man page for a
program called rsh:
"Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is arguably wrong,
but currently hard to fix for reasons too complicated to explain
here."
The man pages contain a lot of such material, which reads like the
terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged
airplanes. The general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure
struggles seen in the stop-action light of a strobe. Each programmer
is dealing with his own obstacles and bugs; he is too busy fixing
them, and improving the software, to explain things at great length or
to maintain elaborate pretensions.
In practice you hardly ever encounter a serious bug while running
Linux. When you do, it is almost always with commercial software
(several vendors sell software that runs under Linux). The operating
system and its fundamental utility programs are too important to
contain serious bugs. I have been running Linux every day since late
1995 and have seen many application programs go down in flames, but I
have never seen the operating system crash. Never. Not once. There
are quite a few Linux systems that have been running continuously and
working hard for months or years without needing to be rebooted.
Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors
as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it
was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in
Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to
eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and
Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and
that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press
releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.
This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do happen. Every
few months Bill Gates tries to demo a new Microsoft product in front
of a large audience only to have it blow up in his face. Commercial
OS vendors, as a direct consequence of being commercial, are forced to
adopt the grossly disingenuous position that bugs are rare
aberrations, usually someone else's fault, and therefore not really
worth talking about in any detail. This posture, which everyone knows
to be absurd, is not limited to press releases and ad campaigns. It
informs the whole way these companies do business and relate to their
customers. If the documentation were properly written, it would
mention bugs, errors, and crashes on every single page. If the
on-line help systems that come with these OSes reflected the
experiences and concerns of their users, they would largely be devoted
to instructions on how to cope with crashes and errors.
But this does not happen. Joint stock corporations are wonderful
inventions that have given us many excellent goods and services. They
are good at many things. Admitting failure is not one of them. Hell,
they can't even admit minor shortcomings.
Of course, this behavior is not as pathological in a corporation as it
would be in a human being. Most people, nowadays, understand that
corporate press releases are issued for the benefit of the
corporation's shareholders and not for the enlightenment of the
public. Sometimes the results of this institutional dishonesty can be
dreadful, as with tobacco and asbestos. In the case of commercial OS
vendors it is nothing of the kind, of course; it is merely annoying.
Some might argue that consumer annoyance, over time, builds up into a
kind of hardened plaque that can conceal serious decay, and that
honesty might therefore be the best policy in the long run; the jury
is still out on this in the operating system market. The business is
expanding fast enough that it's still much better to have billions of
chronically annoyed customers than millions of happy ones.
Most system administrators I know who work with Windows NT all the
time agree that when it hits a snag, it has to be re-booted, and when
it gets seriously messed up, the only way to fix it is to re-install
the operating system from scratch. Or at least this is the only way
that they know of to fix it, which amounts to the same thing. It is
quite possible that the engineers at Microsoft have all sorts of
insider knowledge on how to fix the system when it goes awry, but if
they do, they do not seem to be getting the message out to any of the
actual system administrators I know.
Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact, free, as well
as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate--it does not have
to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it
is much more reliable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the
error is noticed and loudly discussed right away. Anyone with the
requisite technical knowledge can go straight to the source code and
point out the source of the error, which is then rapidly fixed by
whichever hacker has carved out responsibility for that particular
program.
As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux distribution that has its
own constitution (http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what
really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database
(http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday
Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself.
When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a
message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem
was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level
(the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal,
fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian
people hang out. Within twenty-four hours I had received five e-mails
telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America, two from
Europe, and one from Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same
suggestion, which worked, and made my problem go away. But at the
same time, a transcript of this exchange was posted to Debian's bug
database, so that if other users had the same problem later, they
would be able to search through and find the solution without having
to enter a new, redundant bug report.
Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried to install
Windows NT 4.0 on the very same machine about ten months later, in
late 1997. The installation program simply stopped in the middle with
no error messages. I went to the Microsoft Support website and tried
to perform a search for existing help documents that would address my
problem. The search engine was completely nonfunctional; it did
nothing at all. It did not even give me a message telling me that it
was not working.
Eventually I decided that my motherboard must be at fault; it was of a
slightly unusual make and model, and NT did not support as many
different motherboards as Linux. I am always looking for excuses, no
matter how feeble, to buy new hardware, so I bought a new motherboard
that was Windows NT logo-compatible, meaning that the Windows NT logo
was printed right on the box. I installed this into my computer and
got Linux running right away, then attempted to install Windows NT
again. Again, the installation died without any error message or
explanation. By this time a couple of weeks had gone by and I thought
that perhaps the search engine on the Microsoft Support website might
be up and running. I gave that a try but it still didn't work.
So I created a new Microsoft support account, then logged on to submit
the incident. I supplied my product ID number when asked, and then
began to follow the instructions on a series of help screens. In
other words, I was submitting a bug report just as with the Debian bug
tracking system. It's just that the interface was slicker--I was
typing my complaint into little text-editing boxes on Web forms, doing
it all through the GUI, whereas with Debian you send in an e-mail
telegram. I knew that when I was finished submitting the bug report,
it would become proprietary Microsoft information, and other users
wouldn't be able to see it. Many Linux users would refuse to
participate in such a scheme on ethical grounds, but I was willing to
give it a shot as an experiment. In the end, though I was never able
to submit my bug report, because the series of linked web pages that I
was filling out eventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead
end.
So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone support" and
eventually was given a Microsoft telephone number. When I dialed this
number I got a series of piercing beeps and a recorded message from
the phone company saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed
as dialed."
I tried the search page again--it was still completely nonfunctional.
Then I tried PPI (Pay Per Incident) again. This led me through
another series of Web pages until I dead-ended at one reading:
"Notice-there is no Web page matching your request."
I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident screen
reading: "OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused incidents left in
your account. If you would like to purchase a support incident, click
OK-you will then be able to prepay for an incident...." The cost per
incident was $95.
The experiment was beginning to seem rather expensive, so I gave up on
the PPI approach and decided to have a go at the FAQs posted on
Microsoft's website. None of the available FAQs had anything to do
with my problem except for one entitled "I am having some problems
installing NT" which appeared to have been written by flacks, not
engineers.
So I gave up and still, to this day, have never gotten Windows NT
installed on that particular machine. For me, the path of least
resistance was simply to use Debian Linux.
In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful
information. Making them public is a service to other users, and
improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important
that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into
running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting
a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if
you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept
confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your
ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up
their own public bug database.
This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply
makes no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What
Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support
so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in
some kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of routine
maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If people really
wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech
support they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want
something else.
As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs have been
reported to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost all of them have
been fixed a long time ago. There are twelve "critical" bugs still
outstanding, of which the oldest was posted 79 days ago. There are 20
outstanding "grave" bugs of which the oldest is 1166 days old. There
are 48 "important" bugs and hundreds of "normal" and less important
ones.
Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug
database (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own
classification system, including such categories as "Not a Bug,"
"Acknowledged Feature," and "Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here
are nothing more than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified
as "Input Acknowledged." For example, I found one that was posted on
December 30th, 1998. It's in the middle of a long list of bugs,
wedged between one entitled "Mouse working in very strange fashion"
and another called "Change of BView frame does not affect, if BView
not attached to a BWindow."
This one is entitled
R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus
developer rage
and it goes like this:
----------------------------
Be Status: Input Acknowledged BeOS Version: R3.2 Component: unknown
Full Description:
The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to
give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this,
the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people
can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS
not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked
the leaders behind them are.
I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under
miserable conditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe
that making the BeOS less conceptually accessible and far less
reliable will require developers to band together, thus developing the
kind of community where strangers talk to one- another, kind of like
at a grocery store before a huge snowstorm.
Following this same program, it will likely be necessary to move the
BeOS headquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General
environmental discomfort will breed this attitude within and there
truly is no greater recipe for success. I would suggest Seattle, but
I think it's already taken. You might try Washington, DC, but
definitely not somewhere like San Diego or Tucson.
----------------------------
Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the
people who report the bugs (to protect them from retribution!?) and so
I don't know who wrote this.
So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing about the
technical and moral superiority of Debian Linux. But as almost always
happens in the OS world, it's more complicated than that. I have
Windows NT running on another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999),
when I had a problem with it, I decided to have another go at
Microsoft Support. This time the search engine actually worked
(though in order to reach it I had to identify myself as "advanced").
And instead of coughing up some useless FAQ, it located about two
hundred documents (I was using very vague search criteria) that were
obviously bug reports--though they were called something else.
Microsoft, in other words, has got a system up and running that is
functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks and feels
different, of course, but it contains technical nitty-gritty and makes
no bones about the existence of errors.
As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable
position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is
by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can,
and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular
image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in
the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just
like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic
mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion
is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.
Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the people who wrote
manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes
seemed to have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR
departments, from admitting, even obliquely, that the software might
contain bugs or that the interface might be suffering from the
blinking twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual
difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore useless, and
caused even technically self-assured users to wonder whether they were
going subtly insane.
When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior, one wants to
believe that they are really trying their best. We all want to give
Apple the benefit of the doubt, because mean old Bill Gates kicked the
crap out of them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft
does it, one almost cannot help becoming a paranoid conspiracist.
Obviously they are hiding something from us! And yet they are so
powerful! They are trying to drive us crazy!
This approach to dealing with one's customers was straight out of the
Central European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The
adjectives "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't
last, any more than the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a
publicly available bug database. It's called something else, and it
takes a while to find it, but it's there.
They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered Eloi/Morlock
structure of technological society. If you're an Eloi you install
Windows, follow the instructions, hope for the best, and dumbly suffer
when it breaks. If you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it
that you are "advanced," find the bug database, and get the truth
straight from some anonymous Microsoft engineer.
But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the question, once
again, of whether there is any point to being in the OS business at
all. Customers might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to
Microsoft if, in return, they get some advice that no other user is
getting. This has the useful side effect of keeping the users
alienated from one another, which helps maintain the illusion that
bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of those bug reports
become openly available on the Microsoft website, everything changes.
No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chances are
good that some other sucker will do it first, and that instructions on
how to fix the bug will then show up, for free, on a public website.
And as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes an
open admission, on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many
bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I
mentioned, Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports so far.
But it puts Microsoft on an equal footing with the others and makes it
a lot harder for their customers--who want to believe--to believe.
MEMENTO MORI
Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening
telegram, it prompts me to log in with a user name and a password. At
this point the machine is still running the command line interface,
with white letters on a black screen. There are no windows, menus, or
buttons. It does not respond to the mouse; it doesn't even know that
the mouse is there. It is still possible to run a lot of software at
this point. Emacs, for example, exists in both a CLI and a GUI
version (actually there are two GUI versions, reflecting some sort of
doctrinal schism between Richard Stallman and some hackers who got fed
up with him). The same is true of many other Unix programs. Many
don't have a GUI at all, and many that do are capable of running from
the command line.
Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only
see one command line, and so you might think that I could only
interact with one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key
and then hit the F2 function button at the top of my keyboard, I am
presented with a fresh, blank, black screen with a login prompt at the
top of it. I can log in here and start some other program, then hit
Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, which is still doing whatever
it was when I left it. Or I can do Alt-F3 and log in to a third
screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of these screens I might be
logged in as myself, on another as root (the system administrator), on
yet another I might be logged on to some other computer over the
Internet.
Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is an
abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way
I am going right back to that small room at Ames High School where I
first wrote code twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter
and faster than a teletype, and capable of running vastly superior
software, such as emacs or the GNU development tools.
It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure
a Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot
it up. This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have
mine boot into the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a
computational memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to
keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that
all about him was vanity. The tty screen reminds me that the same
thing is true of slick user interfaces.
The X Windows System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to be capable of
running on hundreds of different video cards with different chipsets,
amounts of onboard memory, and motherboard buses. Likewise, there are
hundreds of different types of monitors on the new and used market,
each with different specifications, and so there are probably upwards
of a million different possible combinations of card and monitor. The
only thing they all have in common is that they all work in VGA mode,
which is the old command-line screen that you see for a few seconds
when you launch Windows. So Linux always starts in VGA, with a
teletype interface, because at first it has no idea what sort of
hardware is attached to your computer. In order to get beyond the
glass teletype and into the GUI, you have to tell Linux exactly what
kinds of hardware you have. If you get it wrong, you'll get a blank
screen at best, and at worst you might actually destroy your monitor
by feeding it signals it can't handle.
When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I once spent
the better part of a month trying to get an oddball monitor to work
for me, and filled the better part of a composition book with
increasingly desperate scrawled notes. Nowadays, most Linux
distributions ship with a program that automatically scans the video
card and self-configures the system, so getting X Windows up and
running is nearly as easy as installing an Apple/Microsoft GUI. The
crucial information goes into a file (an ASCII text file, naturally)
called XF86Config, which is worth looking at even if your distribution
creates it for you automatically. For most people it looks like
meaningless cryptic incantations, which is the whole point of looking
at it. An Apple/Microsoft system needs to have the same information
in order to launch its GUI, but it's apt to be deeply hidden
somewhere, and it's probably in a file that can't even be opened and
read by a text editor. All of the important files that make Linux
systems work are right out in the open. They are always ASCII text
files, so you don't need special tools to read them. You can look at
them any time you want, which is good, and you can mess them up and
render your system totally dysfunctional, which is not so good.
At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just so, I enter the
command "startx" to launch the X Windows System. The screen blanks
out for a minute, the monitor makes strange twitching noises, then
reconstitutes itself as a blank gray desktop with a mouse cursor in
the middle. At the same time it is launching a window manager. X
Windows is pretty low-level software; it provides the infrastructure
for a GUI, and it's a heavy industrial infrastructure. But it doesn't
do windows. That's handled by another category of application that
sits atop X Windows, called a window manager. Several of these are
available, all free of course. The classic is twm (Tom's Window
Manager) but there is a smaller and supposedly more efficient variant
of it called fvwm, which is what I use. I have my eye on a completely
different window manager called Enlightenment, which may be the
hippest single technology product I have ever seen, in that (a) it is
for Linux, (b) it is freeware, (c) it is being developed by a very
small number of obsessed hackers, and (d) it looks amazingly cool; it
is the sort of window manager that might show up in the backdrop of an
Aliens movie.
Anyway, the window manager acts as an intermediary between X Windows
and whatever software you want to use. It draws the window frames,
menus, and so on, while the applications themselves draw the actual
content in the windows. The applications might be of any sort: text
editors, Web browsers, graphics packages, or utility programs, such as
a clock or calculator. In other words, from this point on, you feel
as if you have been shunted into a parallel universe that is quite
similar to the familiar Apple or Microsoft one, but slightly and
pervasively different. The premier graphics program under
Apple/Microsoft is Adobe Photoshop, but under Linux it's something
called The GIMP. Instead of the Microsoft Office Suite, you can buy
something called ApplixWare. Many commercial software packages, such
as Mathematica, Netscape Communicator, and Adobe Acrobat, are
available in Linux versions, and depending on how you set up your
window manager you can make them look and behave just as they would
under MacOS or Windows.
But there is one type of window you'll see on Linux GUI that is rare
or nonexistent under other OSes. These windows are called "xterm" and
contain nothing but lines of text--this time, black text on a white
background, though you can make them be different colors if you
choose. Each xterm window is a separate command line interface--a tty
in a window. So even when you are in full GUI mode, you can still
talk to your Linux machine through a command-line interface.
There are many good pieces of Unix software that do not have GUIs at
all. This might be because they were developed before X Windows was
available, or because the people who wrote them did not want to suffer
through all the hassle of creating a GUI, or because they simply do
not need one. In any event, those programs can be invoked by typing
their names into the command line of an xterm window. The whoami
command, mentioned earlier, is a good example. There is another
called wc ("word count") which simply returns the number of lines,
words, and characters in a text file.
The ability to run these little utility programs on the command line
is a great virtue of Unix, and one that is unlikely to be duplicated
by pure GUI operating systems. The wc command, for example, is the
sort of thing that is easy to write with a command line interface. It
probably does not consist of more than a few lines of code, and a
clever programmer could probably write it in a single line. In
compiled form it takes up just a few bytes of disk space. But the
code required to give the same program a graphical user interface
would probably run into hundreds or even thousands of lines, depending
on how fancy the programmer wanted to make it. Compiled into a
runnable piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI
code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot of memory.
This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be
written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to
wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software
package.
GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of
software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the
programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth
writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into
omnibus software packages. As GUIs get more complex, and impose more
and more overhead, this tendency becomes more pervasive, and the
software packages grow ever more colossal; after a point they begin to
merge with each other, as Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint have
merged into Microsoft Office: a stupendous software Wal-Mart sitting
on the edge of a town filled with tiny shops that are all boarded up.
It is an unfair analogy, because when a tiny shop gets boarded up it
means that some small shopkeeper has lost his business. Of course
nothing of the kind happens when "wc" becomes subsumed into one of
Microsoft Word's countless menu items. The only real drawback is a
loss of flexibility for the user, but it is a loss that most customers
obviously do not notice or care about. The most serious drawback to
the Wal-Mart approach is that most users only want or need a tiny
fraction of what is contained in these giant software packages. The
remainder is clutter, dead weight. And yet the user in the next
cubicle over will have completely different opinions as to what is
useful and what isn't.
The other important thing to mention, here, is that Microsoft has
included a genuinely cool feature in the Office package: a Basic
programming package. Basic is the first computer language that I
learned, back when I was using the paper tape and the teletype. By
using the version of Basic that comes with Office you can write your
own little utility programs that know how to interact with all of the
little doohickeys, gewgaws, bells, and whistles in Office. Basic is
easier to use than the languages typically employed in Unix
command-line programming, and Office has reached many, many more
people than the GNU tools. And so it is quite possible that this
feature of Office will, in the end, spawn more hacking than GNU.
But now I'm talking about application software, not operating systems.
And as I've said, Microsoft's application software tends to be very
good stuff. I don't use it very much, because I am nowhere near their
target market. If Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use
and like, then it really will be time to dump their stock, because I
am a market segment of one.
GEEK FATIGUE
Over the years that I've been working with Linux I have filled three
and a half notebooks logging my experiences. I only begin writing
things down when I'm doing something complicated, like setting up X
Windows or fooling around with my Internet connection, and so these
notebooks contain only the record of my struggles and frustrations.
When things are going well for me, I'll work along happily for many
months without jotting down a single note. So these notebooks make
for pretty bleak reading. Changing anything under Linux is a matter
of opening up various of those little ASCII text files and changing a
word here and a character there, in ways that are extremely
significant to how the system operates.
Many of the files that control how Linux operates are nothing more
than command lines that became so long and complicated that not even
Linux hackers could type them correctly. When working with something
as powerful as Linux, you can easily devote a full half-hour to
engineering a single command line. For example, the "find" command,
which searches your file system for files that match certain criteria,
is fantastically powerful and general. Its "man" is eleven pages
long, and these are pithy pages; you could easily expand them into a
whole book. And if that is not complicated enough in and of itself,
you can always pipe the output of one Unix command to the input of
another, equally complicated one. The "pon" command, which is used to
fire up a PPP connection to the Internet, requires so much detailed
information that it is basically impossible to launch it entirely from
the command line. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into
three or four different files. You need a dialing script, which is
effectively a little program telling it how to dial the phone and
respond to various events; an options file, which lists up to about
sixty different options on how the PPP connection is to be set up; and
a secrets file, giving information about your password.
Presumably there are godlike Unix hackers somewhere in the world who
don't need to use these little scripts and options files as crutches,
and who can simply pound out fantastically complex command lines
without making typographical errors and without having to spend hours
flipping through documentation. But I'm not one of them. Like almost
all Linux users, I depend on having all of those details hidden away
in thousands of little ASCII text files, which are in turn wedged into
the recesses of the Unix filesystem. When I want to change something
about the way my system works, I edit those files. I know that if I
don't keep track of every little change I've made, I won't be able to
get your system back in working order after I've gotten it all messed
up. Keeping hand-written logs is tedious, not to mention kind of
anachronistic. But it's necessary.
I probably could have saved myself a lot of headaches by doing
business with a company called Cygnus Support, which exists to provide
assistance to users of free software. But I didn't, because I wanted
to see if I could do it myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but
just barely. And there are many tweaks and optimizations that I could
probably make in my system that I have never gotten around to
attempting, partly because I get tired of being a Morlock some days,
and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a system that generally
works well.
Though Linux works for me and many other users, its sheer power and
generality is its Achilles' heel. If you know what you are doing, you
can buy a cheap PC from any computer store, throw away the Windows
discs that come with it, turn it into a Linux system of mind-boggling
complexity and power. You can hook it up to twelve other Linux boxes
and make it into part of a parallel computer. You can configure it so
that a hundred different people can be logged onto it at once over the
Internet, via as many modem lines, Ethernet cards, TCP/IP sockets, and
packet radio links. You can hang half a dozen different monitors off
of it and play DOOM with someone in Australia while tracking
communications satellites in orbit and controlling your house's lights
and thermostats and streaming live video from your web-cam and surfing
the Net and designing circuit boards on the other screens. But the
sheer power and complexity of the system--the qualities that make it
so vastly technically superior to other OSes--sometimes make it seem
too formidable for routine day-to-day use.
Sometimes, in other words, I just want to go to Disneyland.
The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that
was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where
I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software,
when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that
OS. It is called the BeOS.
ETRE
Many people in the computer business have had a difficult time
grappling with Be, Incorporated, for the simple reason that nothing
about it seems to make any sense whatsoever. It was launched in late
1990, which makes it roughly contemporary with Linux. From the
beginning it has been devoted to creating a new operating system that
is, by design, incompatible with all the others (though, as we shall
see, it is compatible with Unix in some very important ways). If a
definition of "celebrity" is someone who is famous for being famous,
then Be is an anti-celebrity. It is famous for not being famous; it
is famous for being doomed. But it has been doomed for an awfully
long time.
Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people.
In order to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which,
to people who write code, is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary
repetition.
If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older buildings that
have undergone "seismic upgrades," which frequently means that
grotesque superstructures of modern steelwork are erected around
buildings made in, say, a Classical style. When new threats
arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for example--additional layers of even
more high-tech stuff may be constructed, in turn, around these, until
the original building is like a holy relic in a cathedral--a shard of
yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy protective junk.
Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems
working. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought
to be simplified by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no
aesthetic or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth
saving. But it doesn't work that way in practice. If you work with a
computer, you have probably customized your "desktop," the environment
in which you sit down to work every day, and spent a lot of money on
software that works in that environment, and devoted much time to
familiarizing yourself with how it all works. This takes a lot of
time, and time is money. As already mentioned, the desire to have
one's interactions with complex technologies simplified through the
interface, and to surround yourself with virtual tchotchkes and lawn
ornaments, is natural and pervasive--presumably a reaction against the
complexity and formidable abstraction of the computer world.
Computers give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to make
those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by software
companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an OS gets changed,
all the dogs jump up and start barking.
The average computer user is a technological antiquarian who doesn't
really like things to change. He or she is like an urban professional
who has just bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the
furniture and knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen
cupboards, so that everything's just right. If it is necessary for a
bunch of engineers to scurry around in the basement shoring up the
foundation so that it can support the new cast-iron claw-foot bathtub,
and snaking new wires and pipes through the walls to supply modern
appliances, why, so be it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions
of OS users split the cost of their services.
Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium in their
machines, and to be able to surf the web, without messing up all the
stuff that makes them feel as if they know what the hell is going on.
Sometimes this is actually possible. Adding more RAM to your system
is a good example of an upgrade that is not likely to screw anything
up.
Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig,
the whilom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit
against Microsoft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer
on his computer, and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his
personal list of signposts that he used to navigate through the maze
of the Internet. It was as if he'd bought a new set of tires for his
car, and then, when pulling away from the garage, discovered that,
owing to some inscrutable side-effect, every signpost and road map in
the world had been destroyed. If he's like most of us, he had put a
lot of work into compiling that list of bookmarks. This is only a
small taste of the sort of trouble that upgrades can cause. Crappy
old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to
new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.
All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give
us the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about
it, or to change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time,
turns into a giant clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and duct
tape surrounding every operating system. In the jargon of hackers, it
is called "cruft." An operating system that has many, many layers of
it is described as "crufty." Hackers hate to do things twice, but when
they see something crufty, their first impulse is to rip it out, throw
it away, and start anew.
If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today and dropped
into one of these old seismically upgraded buildings, it would look
just the same to him, with all the doors and windows in the same
places--but if he stepped outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if
he'd been brought back with his wits intact--he might question whether
the building had been worth going to so much trouble to save. At some
point, one must ask the question: is this really worth it, or should
we maybe just tear it down and put up a good one? Should we throw
another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning
Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over and
build a tower that doesn't suck?
Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good
idea when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance,
sound prudent management. This is especially true if (as it were) you
never look into the cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a
hacker who spends all his time looking at it from that point of view,
cruft is fundamentally disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go
after it with a crowbar. Or, better yet, simply walk out of the
building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa fall over--and go make a new
one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.
For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and their
customers that the first generation of GUI operating systems was
doomed, and that they would eventually need to be ditched and replaced
with completely fresh ones. During the late Eighties and early
Nineties, Apple launched a few abortive efforts to make fundamentally
new post-Mac OSes such as Pink and Taligent. When those efforts
failed they launched a new project called Copland which also failed.
In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring Be, but instead they
acquired Next, which has an OS called NextStep that is, in effect, a
variant of Unix. As these efforts went on, and on, and on, and failed
and failed and failed, Apple's engineers, who were among the best in
the business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely trying to
turn the little toaster into a multi-tasking, Internet-savvy machine,
and did an amazingly good job of it for a while--sort of like a movie
hero running across a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles'
backs. But in the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles, or
step on a really smart one.
Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a
considerably more orderly way by creating a new OS called Windows NT,
which is explicitly intended to be a direct competitor of Unix. NT
stands for "New Technology" which might be read as an explicit
rejection of cruft. And indeed, NT is reputed to be a lot less crufty
than what MacOS eventually turned into; at one point the documentation
needed to write code on the Mac filled something like 24 binders.
Windows 95 was, and Windows 98 is, crufty because they have to be
backward-compatible with older Microsoft OSes. Linux deals with the
cruft problem in the same way that Eskimos supposedly dealt with
senior citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux
software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting through the
Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They can get away with this
because most of the software is free, so it costs nothing to download
up-to-date versions, and because most Linux users are Morlocks.
The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean sheet of paper
and design an OS the right way. And that is exactly what they did.
This was obviously a good idea from an aesthetic standpoint, but does
not a sound business plan make. Some people I know in the GNU/Linux
world are annoyed with Be for going off on this quixotic adventure
when their formidable skills could have been put to work helping to
promulgate Linux.
Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of
the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for
many years maintained its own separate and independent version of the
English monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with
courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion and a foreign
policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable stiff-neckedness that
gave us the Jacobites, the force de frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in
Quebec, has brought us a really cool operating system. I fart in your
general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!
To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the
existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal
nerve that I felt compelled to support it. I bought a BeBox as soon
as I could. The BeBox was a dual-processor machine, powered by
Motorola chips, made specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run
any other operating system. That's why I bought it. I felt it was a
way to burn my bridges. Its most distinctive feature is two columns
of LEDs on the front panel that zip up and down like tachometers to
convey a sense of how hard each processor is working. I thought it
looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out of
business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable collector's
item.
Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on my BeBox. The
LEDs (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called in the Be community) flash
merrily next to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still
in business, though they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately
after I bought mine. They made the sad, but probably quite wise
decision that hardware was a sucker's game, and ported the BeOS to
Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since these used the same sort of
Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this wasn't especially hard.
Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers and
restored its hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the only new
machines that could run BeOS were made by Apple.
By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed
a keen sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even
if they hadn't, the notion of being dependent on Apple--so frail and
yet so vicious--for their continued existence should have put a fright
into anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping adventure,
they ported the BeOS to Intel chips--the same chips used in Windows
machines. And not a moment too soon, for when Apple came out with its
new top-of-the-line hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they
withheld the technical data that Be's engineers would need to make the
BeOS run on those machines. This would have killed Be, just like a
slug between the eyes, if they hadn't made the jump to Intel.
So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is almost
incredibly motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac orphan-clones, and
Intel machines that are intended to be used for Windows. Of course
the latter type are ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it
would appear that Be's hardware troubles are finally over. Some
German hackers have even come up with a Das Blinkenlights replacement:
it's a circuit board kit that you can plug into PC-compatible machines
running BeOS. It gives you the zooming LED tachometers that were such
a popular feature of the BeBox.
My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do after a
couple of years, and sooner or later I'll probably have to replace it
with an Intel machine. Even after that, though, I will still be able
to use it. Because, inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the
BeBox.
At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a
technological framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up
on modern object-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists
of quasi-independent software entities called objects, which
communicate by sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made
up of such objects, and serves as a kind of post office or Internet
that routes messages to and fro, from object to object. The OS is
multi-threaded, which means that like all other modern OSes it can
walk and chew gum at the same time; but it gives programmers a lot of
power over spawning and terminating threads, or independent
sub-processes. It is also a multi-processing OS, which means that it
is inherently good at running on computers that have more than one CPU
(Linux and Windows NT can also do this proficiently).
For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal
application, which enables you to open up windows that are equivalent
to the xterm windows in Linux. In other words, the command line
interface is available if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a
certain standard called POSIX, it is capable of running most of the
GNU software. That is to say that the vast array of command-line
software developed by the GNU crowd will work in BeOS terminal windows
without complaint. This includes the GNU development tools-the
compiler and linker. And it includes all of the handy little utility
programs. I'm writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text
editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman, but
when I want to find out how long it is, I jump to a terminal window
and run "wc."
As is suggested by the sample bug report I quoted earlier, people who
work for Be, and developers who write code for BeOS, seem to be
enjoying themselves more than their counterparts in other OSes. They
also seem to be a more diverse lot in general. A couple of years ago
I went to an auditorium at a local university to see some
representatives of Be put on a dog-and-pony show. I went because I
assumed that the place would be empty and echoing, and I felt that
they deserved an audience of at least one. In fact, I ended up
standing in an aisle, for hundreds of students had packed the place.
It was like a rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the stage
was a black man, which unfortunately is a very odd thing in the
high-tech world. The other made a ringing denunciation of cruft, and
extolled BeOS for its cruft-free qualities, and actually came out and
said that in ten or fifteen years, when BeOS had become all crufty
like MacOS and Windows 95, it would be time to simply throw it away
and create a new OS from scratch. I doubt that this is an official
Be, Inc. policy, but it sure made a big impression on everyone in the
room! During the late Eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, the OS of
cool people-artists and creative-minded hackers-and BeOS seems to have
the potential to attract the same crowd now. Be mailing lists are
crowded with hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre,
sending flames to each other in fractured techno-English.
The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is doomed.
Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation that they are
doomed with the assertion that BeOS is "a media operating system" made
for media content creators, and hence is not really in competition
with Windows at all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back
to the car dealership analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer
claiming that he is not really in competition with the others because
his car can go three times as fast as theirs and is also capable of
flying.
Be has an office in Paris, and, as mentioned, the conversation on Be
mailing lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they
have made strenuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has
recently begun bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make wild
guess I'd say that they are playing Go while Microsoft is playing
chess. They are staying clear, for now, of Microsoft's overwhelmingly
strong position in North America. They are trying to get themselves
established around the edges of the board, as it were, in Europe and
Japan, where people may be more open to alternative OSes, or at least
more hostile to Microsoft, than they are in the United States.
What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid
to look like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say
"I've tried the BeOS and here's what I think of it." It seems much
more sophisticated to say "Be's chances of carving out a new niche in
the highly competitive OS market are close to nil."
It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in the OS
business, mindshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct
effects on the technology itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that
can be hung off of a personal computer--the printers, scanners,
PalmPilot interfaces, and Lego Mindstorms--require pieces of software
called drivers. Likewise, video cards and (to a lesser extent)
monitors need drivers. Even the different types of motherboards on
the market relate to the OS in different ways, and separate code is
required for each one. All of this hardware-specific code must not
only written but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and
supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast and
complicated, what really determines an OS's fate is not how good the
OS is technically, or how much it costs, but rather the availability
of hardware-specific code. Linux hackers have to write that code
themselves, and they have done an amazingly good job of keeping up to
speed. Be, Inc. has to write all their own drivers, though as BeOS
has begun gathering momentum, third-party developers have begun to
contribute drivers, which are available on Be's web site.
But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn't
have to write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new
video card or peripheral device to market today knows that it will be
unsalable unless it comes with the hardware-specific code that will
make it work under Windows, and so each hardware maker has accepted
the burden of creating and maintaining its own library of drivers.
MINDSHARE
The U.S. Government's assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the
OS market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the
legal mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being
given away for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This
is simply a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like
Microsoft.
Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the government's
witnesses are to be believed, they are not nice guys. But the
accusation of a monopoly simply does not make any sense.
What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized, for the time
being, a certain type of high ground: they dominate in the competition
for mindshare, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be
taken seriously feels compelled to make a product that is compatible
with their operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get
written by the hardware makers, Microsoft doesn't have to write them;
in effect, the hardware makers are adding new components to Windows,
making it a more capable OS, without charging Microsoft for the
service. It is a very good position to be in. The only way to fight
such an opponent is to have an army of highly competetent coders who
write equivalent drivers for free, which Linux does.
But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a
monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance
has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old
robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically
controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the
software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and
the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that
Microsoft controls those.
Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy
software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This
power is very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent
legal proceedings in both Washingtons, it would appear that this power
and this money have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out
and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have administered
saliva tests to some of them before issuing them Microsoft ID cards.
But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of
the word "monopoly," and it's not amenable to a legal fix. The courts
may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split
the company up. But they can't really do anything about a mindshare
monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed
world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure.
Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast,
something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn't possibly
have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory
phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but
connected entities (the world's computer users), making decisions on
their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large
phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot
be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such
phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle
with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try,
end up (a) going crazy, (b) giving up, (c) forming crackpot theories,
or (d) becoming high-paid chaos theory consultants.
Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are dense
enough to believe that mindshare dominance is some kind of stable and
enduring position. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos
they've hired in the pure-business end of the operation, the zealots
who keep getting hauled into court by enraged judges. But most of
them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are
maddeningly unstable, and that there's no telling what weird,
seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a
radically different configuration.
To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that Thomas Penfield
Jackson will not hand down an order that the brains of everyone in the
developed world are to be summarily re-programmed. But there's no way
to predict when people will decide, en masse, to re-program their own
brains. This might explain some of Microsoft's behavior, such as
their policy of keeping eerily large reserves of cash sitting around,
and the extreme anxiety that they display whenever something like Java
comes along.
I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the
top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways,
at regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall.
Each contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal
hammer dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN
THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS.
What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I
don't know, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One
imagines banks collapsing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws
its cash reserves, and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar
bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a plan. But
what I would really like to know is whether, at some level, their
programmers might heave a big sigh of relief if the burden of writing
the One Universal Interface to Everything were suddenly lifted from
their shoulders.
THE RIGHT PINKY OF GOD
In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee
Smolin gives the best description I've ever read of how our universe
emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental
constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range
of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants
completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big
Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe
would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or
some other basically uninteresting thing--a dud, in other words. The
only way to get a universe that's not a dud--that has stars, heavy
elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers just right.
If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes
with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for
every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds.
Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems
comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something
useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have
forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your
right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some
cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out
all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message.
In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all
just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces
something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is
Smolin's criterion for interestingness.
Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you get below a
certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of
string theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as
it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a
small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational
in nature.
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and
beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable
spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating
system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a
teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down
into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his
teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the
values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass
1.673e-27....
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky
hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's
going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another
Big Bang.
Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually
made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in
the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long
messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them
would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply
amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much
more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in
it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way
to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good
at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously
develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge,
those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop
the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth
decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in
which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and
had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political
opinions.
Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself,
on certain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those
arcane commands, and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud
universes can really clutter up your basement. After we'd spent a
while pounding out command lines and hitting that ENTER key and
spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to long for an OS that
would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power
to do everything--to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the
possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been
anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into a series of
dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among
mutually exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of
check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our
life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more complicated
options we could fill in little text boxes (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS:
NUMBER OF SONS:).
Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after
a while, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between
choices. It could become damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve
problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating
system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few
default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our
own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty
damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be
reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of
making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin
to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you
with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled:
LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If
anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you
could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department.
If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your
life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and
in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was
rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as
Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and
enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would
probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that
no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a
sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you
should start making your own.